Aim initiative for academic careers: Learning to Think like an Expert Management Researcher

Learning to Think like an Expert Management ResearcherAIM’s online learning resource is intended for postgraduate and research students, but it will also be useful for academics just starting out on a career in the management field. The website is designed to support researchers with developing your critical frame of mind. A constructively critical way of thinking is characteristic of expert researchers, who have gradually built-up their critical thinking capability as a product of their accumulating research experience. Acquiring this capability can be a slow process if it just occurs incidentally: a side-effect of being a student or an academic. But researchers can accelerate their learning as they go along by consciously developing their ability to think critically and to make informed decisions in their research.Key aspects of studying management are to find things out and then to demonstrate what has been found and why it is significant. This kind of work follows the ‘logic of enquiry’, or detective-work. Finding things out involves asking well-informed questions and designing literature-based and empirical investigations to answer them. Demonstrating what has been found out typically includes writing an account that will convince other people (as with your assignments, dissertation, thesis, or academic articles for publication). Expert researchers have learned the habit of following the logic of enquiry by applying their critical frame of mind. This resource is intended to help you to develop your habit of thinking like an expert.Researchers can do this here in two ways. First, they can visit the link at the top of this page – Introduction. – to learn more about the approach to detective-work reflected in other sections of the resource. The introduction offers both an ‘advance organizer’, or mental framework, and self-assessment exercises to support learning.Second, researchers can go to the Key Topicslink and choose one of these topics to study by clinking on its link. Each key topic contains a series of learning activities focused on common tasks that postgraduate and research students are expected to undertake. These activities include information for raising awareness and reflective exercises and ideas for integrating learning into academic work. Researchers can click on Additional Resourcesfor some suggested further reading. Whether the researcher is a student interested in personal learning, or an academic who is interested in using the materials in teaching of postgraduate or research students, researchers may wish to visit the Using this Resourcelink for ideas and information on how to make effective use of the materials.

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About Wilfred MijnhardtRMIMR is my virtual playground, a place to reflect on issues from my professional context, my job as Policy Director at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). RSM is the international university based business school at Erasmus University Rotterdam. More info here: www.rsm.nl
Here is my list of relevant publications on the topic of my RMIMR weblog:
http://www.mendeley.com/collections/694621/RMIMR-Repository/
The rss feed for my RMIMR collection is here: http://www.mendeley.com/collections/rss/694621/
Here is my other weblog on impact of research: http://www.scoop.it/t/dualimpact